The word "craftsman" summons an immediate image. Peering through a window into a carpenter's shop, you see an elderly man surrounded by his apprentices and his tools. Order reigns within: parts of chairs are clamped neatly together, the smell of wood shavings fills the room, the carpenter bends over his bench to make a fine incision for marquetry. The shop is menaced by a furniture factory down the road.

The craftsman might also be glimpsed at a nearby laboratory. There, a young lab technician is frowning at a table on which six dead rabbits are splayed on their backs, their bellies slit open. She is frowning because something has gone wrong with the injection she has given them; she is trying to figure out if she did the procedure wrong, or if there is something wrong with the procedure.

A third craftsman might be heard in the town's concert hall. There, an orchestra is rehearsing with a visiting conductor; he works obsessively with the string section, going over and over a passage to make the musicians draw their bows at exactly the same speed across the strings. The string players are tired, but also exhilarated because their sound is becoming coherent. The orchestra's manager is worried: if the visiting conductor keeps on, the rehearsal will move into overtime, costing management extra wages. The conductor is oblivious.

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake. Theirs is practical activity, but their labour is not simply a means to another end. The carpenter might sell more furniture if he worked faster; the technician might make do by passing the problem back to her boss; the visiting conductor might be more likely to be rehired if he watched the clock. It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication, but the craftsman exemplifies the special human condition of being engaged.

In today's labour market, doing good work is no guarantee of good fortune. In work, as in politics, sharks and incompetents have no trouble succeeding. Most men and women today spend the largest chunk of their waking hours in getting to work, working, and socialising with people they know at work. The desire to do a good job is one way to make these hours matter. Competence and engagement - the craftsman's ethos - appear to be the most solid source of adult self-respect, according to many studies conducted in Britain and the US.

All craftsmanship is founded on skill developed to a high degree. By one commonly used measure, about 10,000 hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician. As skill progresses, it becomes more problem-attuned, such as the lab technician worrying about procedure - whereas people with primitive levels of skill struggle just to get things to work. At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply about what they are doing, once they do it well.

Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant casually remarked: "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. Of all our limbs, the hands make the most varied movements, movements that can be controlled at will. Science has sought to show how these motions, plus the hand's different ways of gripping and the sense of touch, affect the ways we think.

When learning to play a string instrument, for instance, young children do not know at first where to place their fingers on the fingerboard to produce an accurate pitch. The Suzuki method, named after the Japanese music educator Suzuki Shin'ichi, solves this problem instantly by taping thin plastic strips on to the fingerboard. The child violinist places a finger on a strip to sound a note perfectly in tune. This method emphasises beauty of tone - what Suzuki called "tonalisation" - from the start, without focusing on the complexities of producing a beautiful tone. The hand motion is determined by a fixed destination for the fingertip.

This user-friendly method inspires instant confidence. By the fourth lesson, a child can master the nursery tune "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". And the Suzuki method breeds a sociable confidence; an entire orchestra of seven-year-olds can belt out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" because the hand of each knows exactly what to do. These happy certainties are eroded, however, the moment the strips are removed.

Habit of this mechanical sort fails for a physical reason. The Suzuki method stretches small hands laterally at the knuckle ridge, but does not sensitise the fingertip that presses down on the string. Because the fingertip doesn't know the fingerboard, sour notes appear as soon as the tapes come off. An adult analogy to taping would be the "grammar-check" functions of word-processing programs: these give the button-pusher no insight into why one grammatical construction is preferable to others. As in love, so in technique; innocent confidence is weak.

In music, the ear must instead work in concert with the fingertip to probe. The musician must touch the string in different ways, hear a variety of effects, then search for the means to repeat and reproduce the tone he or she wants. It can be an agonising struggle to answer the questions: "What exactly did I do? How can I do it again?" Instead of the fingertip acting as a mere servant, this kind of touching moves backwards from sensation to procedure. The principle here is reasoning backwards from consequence to cause.

In training young children to play, I've observed how much is required to put this principle of skill into practice. Imagine a boy struggling to play in tune without the Suzuki tapes. He seems to get one note exactly right, but then his ear tells him that the next note he plays in that position sounds sour; feedback from the ear sends the signal that lateral adjustment is needed between the fingers. Through trial and error, he may learn how to squeeze them closer, yet still no solution will be in sight. He may have held his hand at a right angle to the fingerboard. Perhaps now he should try sloping the palm to one side, up towards the pegs; this helps. But this new position makes a hash of the lateral problem he thought he had solved. And on it goes. Every new issue of playing in tune causes him to rethink solutions arrived at before.

Learning from touch is one way in which musical skill develops - and the principle of reasoning backwards, from effects to causes, underlies all good craftsmanship. The method may seem idiosyncratic, subjective. But the musician has an objective standard to meet: playing in tune. As a performer, at my fingertips I often experience error - but error I have learned to recognise. Sometimes, in discussions of education, this recognition is reduced to the cliché of "learning from one's mistakes". Musical technique shows that the matter is not so simple. I have to be willing to make errors, to play wrong notes, in order to get them right eventually. This is the commitment to truthfulness that the young musician makes by removing the Suzuki tapes.

This musical quest addresses one of the shibboleths in craftsmanship: the ideal of "fit-for-purpose". In tools, as in technique, the good craftsman is supposed to eliminate all procedures that do not serve a predetermined end. The ideal of fit-for-purpose has dominated thinking in the industrial era. Diderot's Encyclopedia in the 18th century celebrated an ideal paper-making factory at L'Anglée, in which there was no mess or wasted paper. Today, programmers similarly dream of systems without "dead ends". But the ideal of fit-for-purpose can work against experiment in developing a tool or a skill; it should properly be seen as an achievement, a result. To arrive at that goal, the craftsman at work has instead to dwell in waste, following up dead ends. In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter problems; he or she creates them in order to know them. Improving one's technique is never a routine, mechanical process.

It's easy to imagine that you have to be a genius in order to become highly skilled, or at least that exceptional talent rules in the craftsman's roost. But I don't believe this. While not everyone can become a master musician, it seems to me that skill in any craftwork can be improved; there is no fixed line between the gifted few and the incompetent mass. This is because skill is a capacity that we develop, and all of us can draw on basic human talents to do so.

Three abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship: to localise, to question and to open up. The first involves making a matter concrete; the second, reflecting on its qualities; the third, expanding its sense. The carpenter establishes the peculiar grain of a single piece of wood, looking for detail; turns the wood over and over, pondering how the pattern on the surface might reflect the structure hidden underneath; decides that the grain can be brought out if he or she uses a metal solvent rather than standard wood varnish. To deploy these capabilities the brain needs to process visual, aural, tactile and language-symbol information simultaneously.

The self-respect that people can earn by being good craftsmen does not come easily. To develop skill requires a good measure of experiment and questioning; mechanical practice seldom enables people to improve their skills. Too often we imagine good work itself as success built, economically and efficiently, upon success. Developing skill is more arduous and erratic than this.

But most people have it in them to become good craftsmen. They have the capacities to become better at, and more involved in, what they do - the abilities to localise, question and open up problems that can result, eventually, in good work. Even if society does not reward people who have made this effort as much as it should, in the end, they can achieve a sense of self-worth - which is reward enough.

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